The entrants

AOpen

AOpen is an established name in the OEM sector, with their products shipping in a number of systems. AOpen produces a wide variety of system components, from optical drives, to graphics cards and motherboards, cases, CPU coolers, speakers, and input devices. AOpen even produces LCD monitors and notebook computers! In other words, name any system component and chances are AOpen produces it. With margins on some of these components razor thin (such as motherboards) this protects AOpen financially.

One area AOpen has recently expanded into is small form factor. Their XC Cube series of SFF PCs are truly giving Shuttle a run for their money, with stylish designs that look just as good as they function.

AOpen’s submission into our invitational was a very late entry – the system literally showed up the morning of the show! As a result, we weren’t able to run our full suite of benchmarks on it, but we did manage to look over the system’s specs. At the heart of the system was AOpen’s nForce4 Ultra motherboard, the nCK804Ua-LFS. AOpen then paired the board with an Athlon 64 3000+ processor. Cooling the chip was AOpen’s AC48L cooler.

For graphics, AOpen used their Aeolus 6800Ultra-DVD256 PCI-E card, while on the memory side, the system was equipped with 512MB of Kingston HyperX DDR400 memory. The entire system was housed inside a green AOpen Nouveau aluminum case.

ABIT

ABIT is the first company we’ll highlight today. ABIT is a company that continues to innovate with their motherboard and graphics card products. ABIT was actually the first manufacturer to implement jumperless technology into their motherboards, with the company still continuing to gear their products towards the enthusiast/overclocking community. Since then ABIT has spearheaded other efforts: their “RAID for everyone” initiative was responsible for making IDE RAID a standard feature on most motherboards, and is so popular it’s been added to the latest chipsets from Intel, NVIDIA, and VIA.

ABIT has put great amount of emphasis on their new Fatal1ty line of products over the last year, releasing a number of highly praised Fatal1ty motherboards and graphics cards.
These products are geared exclusively towards the high-end crowd, with features such as enhanced OTES cooling and, more recently, ABIT’s AudioMAX technology, which is designed to reduce the audio interference you’ll sometimes encounter with onboard sound.

ABIT’s submission featured their highly successful, Intel 925XE-based Fatal1ty AA8XE motherboard. The AA8XE features ABIT’s patented OC strips, OTES RamFlow, and OTES AeroFlow for better cooling as well as dual OTES fans near the processor. The motherboard automatically overclocked the bundled Pentium 4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition CPU ABIT used to 3.78GHz, but ABIT chose to not manually overclock their submission.

Also included was ABIT’s Radeon X800XL graphics card, and 1GB of Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Memory. For casing, ABIT used a brand-new Thermaltake Eclipse DV case, one that should be available to buy sometime in late July / early August.

Albatron

Albatron, a company only in it’s third Computex, was a newcomer to this year’s tournament. The company has done very well worldwide in the motherboard and graphics card markets, often specializing in powerful mid-ranged products. Besides motherboards and graphics cards, Albatron also manufactures LCD TVs and plasma displays.

Arguably the most talked about feature at Albatron’s booth this year however was ATOP, Albtraon’s bridging technology that allows you to use your AGP graphics card in a PCI Express motherboard, converting signals appropriately. This is helpful for anyone who is upgrading on a slim budget. Before ATOP if you upgraded to a PCI-E motherboard, you had to purchase a new PCI-E graphics card as well. With ATOP, you can use your existing AGP card until you’re ready to purchase a new PCI-E card. With PCI-E variants of existing cards performing similarly to their AGP-based equivalent, ATOP could become a viable solution for a lot of people.

For our invitational event, Albatron’s submission was built on their latest motherboard product, the nForce4 SLI-based K8SLI motherboard. For processing, Albatron included AMD’s Athlon 64 3200+ CPU with the board, and the system was outfitted with 512MB of DDR 400 memory. Albatron also included their new PC6800Q GeForce 6800 cards in SLI mode.

The PC6800Q is one of Albatron’s first cards to take advantage of their latest heatpipe-based WiseFan technology. WiseFan uses an aluminum heatsink outfitted with a heatpipe cooler to cool the GPU. Sitting atop this is an enclosure with three fans inside, supplying the heatsink and heatpipe with fresh, cool air. The fan enclosure uses Albatron’s 2+1 backup fan technology, which uses two fans to cool the card, plus a third fan, which is available in case one of the fans fails.